1. Technical Field
This disclosure generally relates to content management systems, and more specifically relates to processing documents in a content management system.
2. Background Art
Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an XML-based architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering technical information in a variety of forms. DITA was introduced by International Business Machines Corporation in 2001, and since that time has become standardized and generally accepted as a viable technical documentation framework in a variety of industries. DITA is a powerful architecture for dividing content into small, self-contained topics that can be reused. DITA supports specialization, which allows base types to be extended, or specialized, as needed for specific purposes. In this manner a single DITA element may be customized via specializations to different uses.
Content management systems (CMSs) have been developed and allow many users to efficiently share electronic content such as text, audio files, video files, pictures, graphics, etc. Content management systems typically control access to content in a repository. A user may generate content, and when the content is checked into the repository, the content may be subsequently processed by the CMS according to predefined rules. A user may also check out content from the repository, or link to content in the repository while generating content. The rules in a CMS assure that content that comes into or out of the system or that is linked to meets desired criteria specified in the rules.
To date, there has not been an effective way to merge the features of CMS relationship management and rule processing with the benefits of DITA specialization. This is because known content management systems do not adequately support the seamless integration of specialized DITA artifacts with their associated base DITA artifacts. Namely, there is a lack of formal binding between a specialization and its base type(s), as well as a lack of automatic inheritance of applicable base content rules when the specialization is created in the CMS. Without a way for a content management system to process DITA specializations more intelligently, the benefits of using the DITA architecture in a content management system will not be fully realized.